The Great Rehearsal

152 THE GREAT REHEARSAL

interest The old confederation had not meddled with this point;
and he did not see any greater necessity for bringing it within
the policy of the new one."

Charles Pinclcney flatly declared: "South Carolina can never
receive the plan if it prohibits the slave trade. In every pro-
posed extension of the powers of Congress, that State has ex-
pressly & watchfully excepted that of meddling with the im-
portation of negroes." But if the states were "all left at liberty
on this subject,** South Carolina might "perhaps by degrees" pass
her own laws against the importation of slaves, as Virginia and
Maryland had already done—and also, though he did not speak
of it, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
New York, and Pennsylvania. Even in South Carolina, Rudedge's .
own brother, Edward Rutledge* who was a brother-in-law of
Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, had in 1785 made a vigorous
effort to have the slave trade to their state prohibited for three
years.

In all of the states, from the northernmost down through Vir-
ginia, slavery had become steadily less profitable, and opposition
to it on political and moral grounds was steadily rising. The
Quakers had organized the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting
the Abolition of Slavery, and the Relief of Free Negroes Un-
lawfully held in Bondage, with Franklin as president. The Con-
tinental Congress had forbidden slavery in the Northwest Terri-
tory. But in South Carolina and Georgia the cultivation of the
staple crops, particularly rice, called for so many slaves who
died so rapidly that it was impossible to depend on the natural
increase of their numbers and necessary to import more if the
economy of those states was to be maintained. The South Caro-
lina delegates were resolved that it must be, and the Georgia
delegates followed their lead. Baldwin of Georgia, born in
Connecticut, educated at Yale, and a clergyman, was as firm
£s any of his Southern colleagues, though he thought that
Georgia, **if left to herself," might "probably put a stop to the
eviT of slavery.

The most powerful attack on the slave trade came from Mason
of Virginia on August 22. He stood up that day like a Common-
wealth man of Milton's time, tall, white-haired, his black eyes
burning, to condemn Hie infernal traffic." It had originated, he
said, "in the avarice of British Merchants/* Virginia had made